A review by unladylike
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 3: The Smartest There Is by

2.0

I like this book and character more than when it first started, but here's my problem with it that keeps bugging me: to write a story where the protagonist is supposed to be The Smartest There Is, you have to start with a very smart writer. We get that with The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl regularly - lessons in logic, computer science, American Sign Language, conflict resolution negotiations, and many real-world facts about animal behaviors. Squirrel Girl does not claim to have an Intelligence stat of 10, but the reader actually gets to become smarter while seeing what brains paired with humility and compassion looks like. It might make sense that 9-year-old Lunella hasn't matured enough to present her intelligence with such grace, but her expressions of intelligence look more like parlor tricks than exceptional wits. We get words like "thesis" and "quantum" and other words that would pop up on a cloud graph of commonly-found words in a B.S. program. Visually, we're shown a pretty green holographic puzzle that Bruce Banner designed, and a triceratops made out of Lego blocks. These things, along with spring-loaded roller skates and boxing gloves, are fun, but there's never anything of substance to make the reader really believe that Lunella is a super-genius. It felt to me more like what a couple of stoned high school drop-outs might *imagine* being The Smartest There Is looks and sounds like.

If Moon Girl were written by someone of exceptional intelligence, who has interesting truths to reveal through the pages, then we would have a much better, more internally-consistent and believable comic.